4 | CHAPTER 1
It may be objected that philosophy was and remains a minority pursuit.
But more general study of early Islam can improve our appreciation of its in-
teraction with the imaginative worlds of Biblical and rabbinic Judaism and
Eastern, especially Syriac, Christianity. Note particularly the Corpus Cor-
anicum project at the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, which aims,
by “realigning the Qurʾān into Late Antiquity” and tracking Jewish and Chris-
tian parallels to the Qurʾanic text, to present it as part of the European heri-
tage and illuminate the range of possible relationships between these mono-
theistic belief systems, not just then but now too.^6 Through the Qurʾanic
Jesus, for instance, we grow to appreciate the shared prophetic heritage of all
three religions, obscured by Christian insistence on the uniqueness of God’s
son. By studying the debates between Muslims and Christians in the Abbasid
Caliphate, Christians may be helped to see their teachings in ways that bring
out their essential compatibility with Islam’s strict monotheism. If one starts
from what both religions—and Judaism—affirm, namely the unity of God,
then what Muslims see as Christianity’s two stumbling blocks, namely the
Trinity and Incarnation, may be understood as means of communicating that
unity to humans. Although the modern study of comparative religion origi-
nated in Christian European scholars’ investigations of Judaism and the
Greco-Roman tradition, Islam offers a still better vantage point, as was al-
ready apparent in the work of, for example, the Eastern Iranian polymath and
historian of—among much else—religion, Bīrūnī (d. 1048).^7
Going back to the First Millennium makes sense, then, in terms of defining
and securing the foundations of the contemporary debate with and about
Islam. Non- Muslim scholarship on Islam has rightly been criticized for obses-
sion with origins, and neglect of the living tradition with its distinctive view
of the foundational phase.^8 But it is also true that failure to look behind later
orthodoxies and rigidified dogmatic formulations (especially fundamentalist
ones, which tend to simplify a diverse, un- self- consciously poly valent, “am-
biguous” tradition in response to criticism contained in universalizing, hege-
monial Western discourse^9 ) can suggest Islam is by its very nature inflexible
and closed to the world around it. No student of Islamic origins, at least in the
manner of the Corpus Coranicum project, will easily fall into this trap. Nor
6 See contributions by A. Neuwirth and M. J. Marx to D. Hartwig and others (eds), “Im vollen Licht
der Geschichte”: Die Wissenschaft des Judentums und die Anfänge der kritischen Koranforschung (Würzburg
2008) 11–53; A. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike: Ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin 2010);
http://koran.bbaw.de; http://www.corpuscoranicum.de.
7 G. G. Stroumsa, A new science (Cambridge, Mass. 2010) 10–11, 22, 41; F. de Blois, “Bīrūnī, Abū
Rayhān vii,” EIr 4.283–85.
8 Cf. A. Hourani, Islam in European thought (Cambridge 1991) 41, 42, 50, 59–60. Beginning in
the 1970s, Anglo- Saxon skepticism about the formative phase led to neglect of that too: N. Sinai, Fort-
schreibung und Auslegung : Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation (Wiesbaden 2009) IX.
9 This is the argument of Bauer, Ambiguität [1:5], e.g., 186–87, 268–69.